Ulric (Dick) Neisser was the “father of cognitive psychology” and an advocate for ecological approaches to cognitive research. Neisser was a brilliant synthesizer of diverse thoughts and findings. He was an elegant, clear, and persuasive writer. Neisser was also a relentlessly creative researcher, constantly striving to invent methods to explore important questions. Throughout his career, Neisser remained a champion of the underdog and an unrepentant revolutionary — his goal was to push psychology in the right direction. In addition, Dick was a lifelong baseball fan, a challenging mentor, and a good friend.
With the publication of Cognitive Psychology (1967), Neisser brought together research concerning perception, pattern recognition, attention, problem solving, and remembering. With his usual elegant prose, he emphasized both information processing and constructive processing. Neisser always described Cognitive Psychology as an assault on behaviorism. He was uncomfortable with behaviorism because he considered behaviorist assumptions wrong and because those assumptions limited what psychologists could study. In Cognitive Psychology, he did not explicitly attack behaviorism, but instead presented a compelling alternative. The book was immediately successful. Researchers working on problems throughout the field saw a unified theory that connected their research to this approach. Because Neisser first pulled these areas together, he was frequently referred to and introduced as the “father of cognitive psychology.” As the champion of underdogs and revolutionary approaches, however, Neisser was uncomfortable in such a role.
In many ways, Cognitive Psychology was the culmination of Neisser’s own academic journey to that point. Neisser gained an appreciation of information theory through his interactions with George Miller at Harvard and MIT. He pursued his first graduate degree at Swarthmore working with the Gestalt psychologists Wolfgang Kohler and Hans Wallach. He worked with Oliver Selfridge on the Pandemonium parallel processing model of computer pattern recognition and then demonstrated parallel-visual search in a series of creative experiments. While Cognitive Psychology can be viewed as the founding book for the field, it can also be seen as the work of an intellectually curious revolutionary bent on finding the correct way to understand human nature.
When Neisser moved to Cornell, he developed an appreciation of James J. and Eleanor J. Gibson’s theory of direct perception — the idea that information in the optic array directly specifies the state of the world without the need for constructive processes during perception. Neisser had also become disenchanted with information-processing theories, reaction-time studies, and simplistic laboratory research. In response to his concerns, Neisser contributed to another intellectual revolution by becoming an advocate for ecological cognitive research. He argued that research should be designed to explore how people perceive, think, and remember in tasks and environments that reflect real world situations. In Cognition and Reality, Neisser integrated Gibsonian direct perception with constructive processes in cognition through his perceptual cycle: Information picked up through perception activates schemata, which in turn guides attention and action leading to the search for additional information.
Based on the perceptual cycle, Neisser and Robert Becklen created a series of experiments concerning selective looking (now called inattentional blindness). In these experiments, people watched superimposed videos of different events on a single screen. When they actively tracked one event, counting basketball passes by a set of players for example, they would miss surprising novel events, such as a woman with an umbrella walking through the scene. In describing the genesis of these studies, Neisser told me that he had been trying to find a visual method similar to dichotic listening studies when he was inspired by looking out a window at twilight. He realized he could see the world outside the window or he could selectively focus attention on the reflection of the room in the window. In other attention research, Neisser explored multitasking with Elizabeth Spelke and William Hirst. They found that people can learn to perform two difficult tasks simultaneously without switching tasks or having one task become automatic.